Adam Selvidge's Website Blog
It was supposed to be a working vacation… For Jacky Bouchard (aka, Artemis: vampire, former night-stalking dark avenger, and reluctant superhero), a trip to the Big Easy was a chance to solidify her new Bouchard identity, meet the grandmother she didn’t know she had, and do a favor for the New Orleans Police Department by helping them keep an eye on their local vampires. Watching a bunch of fashion-obsessed goths with fangs should have been easy, but now she’s dressing in black and sleeping in a coffin even though living the whole Fiend of The Night stereotype makes her want...
Ghost Rider: Directed by Mark Steven Johnson. With Matt Long, Raquel Alessi, Brett Cullen, Peter Fonda. When motorcycle rider Johnny Blaze sells his soul to the Devil to save his father’s life, he is transformed into the Ghost Rider, the Devil’s own bounty hunter, and is sent to hunt down sinners. I’m on a very slow mission to buy all the movies that Stan Lee is in, which is obviously going to lead me to owning nearly all of the legacy Marvel films like “The Trial of the Incredible Hulk” and “The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer”. So...
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: Directed by John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein. With Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith. A charming thief and a band of unlikely adventurers embark on an epic quest to retrieve a lost relic, but things go dangerously awry when they run afoul of the wrong people. I swear I saw this opening weekend, but I’m just now getting around to logging it here. Imagine you’re at the game table with 5 of your friends playing a campaign for the 50th weekly session. The DM takes all the notes from your sessions, gives...
FIGHTING THE FUTURE. Astra has finished her training and is now a full-fledged Sentinel, but things are not going well. She suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the public revelation of her relationship with Atlas has caused her popularity to nose-dive.To complicate things, the Teatime Anarchist’s intervention has changed the course of events–leaving her with lots of knowledge about the way the future was before the Big One, a complete future-history that is now out of date. And just when she thinks she’s getting a handle on things, unfolding events (a bank-robbery and a horrific murder) show that one of...
WHO WANTS TO BE A SUPERHERO? Hope did, but she grew out of it. Which made her superhuman breakthrough in the Ashland Bombing, just before starting her freshman year at the University of Chicago, more than a little ironic. And now she has some decisions to make. Given the code-name “Astra” and invited to join the Sentinels, Chicago’s premier super-team, will she take up the cape and mask and become a career superhero? Or will she get a handle on her new powers (super-strength has some serious drawbacks) and then get on with her life-plan?In a world where superheroes join...
The Super Mario Bros. Movie: Directed by Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Pierre Leduc, Fabien Polack. With Kevin Michael Richardson, Jack Black, Khary Payton, Chris Pratt. The story of The Super Mario Bros. on their journey through the Mushroom Kingdom. Illumination studios has weaponized nostalgia, reducing it to a most potent and deadly series of theme songs, visual cues, character revelations, and story elements. I have a few notes to complain about, primarily doing with the completely out of place dog scene in the first third of the film, but other than that the entire thing is a damn near perfect...
All his life, Hank Cho wanted to join the ranks of the Habsec – the rulers of the orbital habitat his people call home. But when he finds a powerful, forbidden weapon from the deep past, a single moment of violence sets his life – and the brutal society of the habitat – into upheaval. Hunted by the cannibalistic Habsec and sheltered by former enemies, Cho finds himself caught within a civil war that threatens to destroy his world. A fun journey with lots of back story to soak in, I’ve love to see more of this universe to find...
Scream VI: Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett. With Courteney Cox, Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Jasmin Savoy Brown. In the next installment, the survivors of the Ghostface killings leave Woodsboro behind and start a fresh chapter in New York City. My wife and I watched all five of the Scream films in an exceptionally coordinated effort in the 3 days leading up to our AMC reservations for Scream VI. Watching them all nearly back to back like that really shows how the franchise and the genre itself has evolved from a navel-gazing, self referential treatise on slashers to something that’s...
Become a Ghost, fighting against a rogue spec ops faction called the Wolves, in the latest Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon®! I’m not done with this game, not by far, but it’s a solid enough experience that I’m going to be playing for the next few months off and on that I figured at about 20 hours in, I had a solid enough opinion about it that I could get the review done. Originally released back in 2019, they just had a sale for the omega premium pro ultra platinum edition which comes with most of the DLC, so I grabbed...
The Whale: Directed by Darren Aronofsky. With Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, Hong Chau. A reclusive, morbidly obese English teacher attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter. Brendan Fraser’s official return to Hollywood glory, even though I’ve personally seen him or heard him in several things prior to this. It’s a good film with a small cast of five or six people, two or three filming areas, and a story that cuts way too close to home. I recently had a medical wake up call that resulted in me deciding that I didn’t need to eat the things...
